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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

TURKISH AEROSPACE RELIES ON NVIDIA GRID FOR VDI

Turkish Aerospace
Industries, Inc. (TAI) is Turkey’s center of technology for the design,
development, modernization, manufacturing, integration and life cycle support
of integrated aerospace systems, from fixed and rotary wing aircraft to
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems and space systems. With the strategic
investments made in recent years, TAI has established a respected and
recognized presence in the global market as a reliable player known for its
technologies and commitment to ultimate customer satisfaction. The widespread
product and activity range grant TAI a unique and unmatched position globally.
In order to handle the increasing number of engineers and required graphics
power, TAI recently adopted NVIDIA’s GRID graphics-accelerated virtual desktop
and application technology to streamline its IT network and optimize available
GPU resources.

TAI currently has over 1,500
engineers at its central facility in Ankara, but plans to double that number
within the next few years. User hardware varies greatly, ranging from
entry-level thin clients with standard office productivity applications (e.g.
Internet Explorer ® and Microsoft ® Office) to advanced workstations with heavy
CAD applications for design and visualization (e.g. Siemens NX). Each user
requires dedicated graphics cards—both for the graphics-intensive applications
on the professional-grade workstations, and to view CAD data on thin clients
and business PCs over TAI’s secure Intranet, via applications such as Siemens
PLM Viewer and Oracle AutoVue. TAI’s IT department faced significant challenges
in supporting varying hardware setups and dozens of different applications, and
knew they needed to simplify before they continued expanding. Furthermore, with
its previous 1:1 user-to-graphics card setup, TAI needed a way to increase user
density and more efficiently allocate GPU power as needed to its growing pool
of engineers.

“Virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) and dynamic allocation of GPU power to virtual machines
via vGPU ™ became a necessity for our IT department,” explained Serdar Kaya, IT
System Engineer, TAI. “In this environment where we are constantly expanding,
and our engineers require varying amounts of graphics power each day from
project to project, simply buying and maintaining more workstations and more
graphics cards became costly and unmanageable. We needed to be able to simplify
overall and also increase our user density.”TAI had already adopted Citrix’s
XenDesktop ® and XenApp to begin shifting to a virtualized infrastructure - but
graphics density and allotment remained hurdles.

Virtual GPU sharing allowed
TAI to maximize the efficiency of its available resources. No longer tied to a
1:1 GPU setup, the IT department could allocate graphics power to a wide range
of simultaneous users as needed. The availability of this technology allowed
TAI’s workforce to scale up while being easily manageable for the IT
department, and without requiring additional space in the server room.

“A common problem we faced
was that an engineer would be working on Project A where he might require
additional memory or more graphics power than usual, so we install more RAM and
higher-end graphics cards onto his workstation,” explained Kaya. “But then
after a few weeks this engineer would switch over to Project B, which had
lesser requirements, but it’s not necessarily worth it for us to uninstall the
extra RAM or extra GPU. Now multiply that by thousands of engineers. NVIDIA
GRID ™ allows us to optimize our hardware investments so that resources can be
easily shared and transferred between users as needed - nothing goes to waste.”

“VDI and GRID make the job
so much easier for our IT department, because GRID supports our entire range of
users - from thin client hardware to advanced workstation hardware, and from
basic productivity applications to professional design and visualization
applications,” said Kaya. “GRID really streamlined our IT support. I can now
give our users a boost of GPU power on the fly. It’s as simple as allocating additional
GPUs in XenServer, and the GPU upgrade is there once the virtual machine is
powered up again.”

IMPACT

“NVIDIA GRID is like
nitrogen for virtual desktop infrastructure,” continued Kaya. “You use nitrogen
in your car engine when you require an extra boost of power - and that’s
exactly what GRID has done for our virtual machines.”

TAI plans to outfit its
Ankara facility with several more GRID K1 and K2-equipped servers, to fully
realize the benefits of virtual GPU technology for its growing user base. And with
the recent release of Citrix XenDesktop 7, TAI can leverage new improvements for
even more GRID functionality.

“NVIDIA GRID is allowing
TAI to expand efficiently,” said Kaya. “It supports our dynamic environment by
optimizing our available resources and eliminating strains on IT. I am eager to
increase our number of GRID-equipped servers, so that we can share the benefits
of the virtual GPU with as many of our users as possible.”

“With GRID, TAI has been
able to enhance IT efficiency and performance, which reduces costs and improves
productivity. This technology will help us to achieve our goals within the
global aerospace industry,” concluded Gülsen Bayramusta, Manager of IT, TAI.